This Week in Fiction: Lionel Shriver

_In this week’s story, “Kilifi Creek,” a slightly headstrong and heedless young woman named Liana gets into some trouble in Kenya. You’ve written about Africa before, notably in your novel “Game Control.” Can you tell us a little about your experiences there, and what makes it such tempting fictional territory, especially juxtaposed with catastrophe? And is Kilifi Creek a place you’ve been?

In my more adventurous days (my residence in London doesn’t remotely count as adventurous), in 1990-91, I spent over a year in Africa, mostly in Nairobi, which I have visited several times. Even now, it’s a continent that for us Westerners still seems truly elsewhere, and it always carries a frisson of danger. For Liana, the story’s protagonist, having headed to Africa for her first big trip abroad suggests a fearlessness. As her host Beano says, “she has a certain intrepid quality, which may be deadly, but which until it’s frightened out of her I rather admire.” “Kilifi Creek” is perhaps the first in a long line of experiences through which that intrepidness will be frightened out of her.

Most of my own experiences in Africa were pretty safe (and yes, I have been to Kilifi, which is gorgeous), although the most terrifying thing I did there was drive. I only learned to drive in order to live in Nairobi, where, without a car, it would have been difficult to get around. Kenya, at that time, had the highest per capita death rate on the roads in the world. It’s amazing my hair didn’t turn permanently white. Once I returned from that trip, I quit driving altogether, and still cycle everywhere instead. Driving felt much braver than hunting some little lion or something._How would this story have been different if Liana had been a man? Is there a desire on her part to prove herself with acts of bravery, like swimming in Kilifi Creek?

I’m not sure it would be that different if the story were about a young man. Oh, because the protagonist is a woman she seems more vulnerable. But really, what she chooses to do is not that outrageous. She simply goes for a river swim on her own. For either gender, that wouldn’t present itself as necessarily taking your life in your hands. Besides, the story is getting at a universal experience that isn’t confined to women: coming within a hair’s breadth of dying, after which everything is fine because, of course, nothing actually happened to you—except that something did happen, in your head. I think it’s only these close scrapes, when visions of matters going the other way become horrifyingly vivid, that force us to realize in a deep, gut sense that we really are going to die._There’s a strong implication that, after her near brush with death at Kilifi Creek, Liana becomes wiser—is this simply the maturity of age, or does Liana believe that the incident has really taught her something?

She does learn something, but the text is firm on this point: the lesson is not some simplistic business about being more respectful of water or resolving never to swim alone. She has been exposed to her own weakness, to her capacity for making fatal mistakes, and, most of all, to her mortality. I do rather like that passage about her disappointment at discovering that maturity “can make you smaller.” Fearlessness—that aforementioned intrepid quality—is ninety per cent ignorance. As I’ve aged myself, I’ve grown far less inclined to take the risks I did in my youth. That’s a loss. Less happens to me as a consequence. But it also helps to explain why I’m still here._Liana’s ultimate fate has parallels to some real-life tragedies. What made this seem like a fitting end to her story?

There’s an intentionally neat parallel between the main story and the one at the end. Liana enjoys almost exactly the same degree of culpability for what happens (or, in the first instance, didn’t happen). But the risk she takes at the end is of a highly urban character, and it represents the sort of seemingly minor daring that a character like this might display once older. She hasn’t flown to Africa by herself; she’s set up an apartment by herself, and likes to push her luck just a tiny bit by propping on the railing of the building’s roof. But the way she’s sitting isn’t described as tempting fate, any more than going for a swim in a river was necessarily tempting fate. It’s just that, well, this time, the tiny, arbitrary increment that determines whether things go one way or the other tilts in the other direction. These moments in which we almost die cast such dark shadows precisely because they are harbingers of the day we don’t turn out to be quite so lucky.

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